End of year memorial: September

To make ‘The Enormous Family Album’ (TEFA) I brought down a small desk from the back bedroom on the first floor. I needed the desk to accommodate my computer, on which I had the titled files that had been used to make many TEFA prints. I’d plug my ancient laptop computer into the power and scan through file names looking for the right one, then write up a label on paper and paste it into TEFA because sometimes the only information I had about photos was in the file or folder name. 

I started doing this work on about 3 Sept when I carried down thousands of photos and dumped them on the dining table. I worked every evening doing photos (4 corner sticky tabs each photo) while watching TV, or at least I had the TV on in the background providing noise and company while I worked otherwise in silence. I think that I got the story straight, my aim to help the photos tell the story of the Dean da Silva Kewish Caldicott families – my family names, the ones I grew up with – so that I’d have something to pass onto the Yokotas and Matsumotos.

Yokota is my son’s last name, Matsumoto is my daughter’s last name.

I am the last of the da Silvas in Australia, the name subsuming Dean, Caldicott and Kewish. But Australia rejected us and we went elsewhere to establish families, me in Japan my brother in the US. The album is a chronicle of disaster stemming from my father, a malignant narcissist who, when he realised that both his children had run away out of sheer terror, went back to Portugal to find a replacement family there, even though growing up he had NEVER said a single word about any of them out there in a homeland he always seemed to despise because he seemed to hate his father. Dad used to make fun of my grandfather on account of Joao Luis’ bad English and he ridiculed things like temper tantrums not making any effort to understand “why”. Things like racism.

My Japanese family calls my father “P-chan” with “P” standing for “Peter” and “chan” being a familiar diminutive used noncommittally in Japan to refer for example to children or boyfriends. There’s nothing else to do, he’s part of our lives forever or at least for as long as anyone gives face to his memory but he NEVER once in the nine years that I lived in Japan made the effort to visit us where we lived. He could go to Portugal to stay for months to meet with family there but his own grandchildren didn’t get to see him unless WE travelled to a place that was convenient for HIM.

A sick joke.

Not a father.

The problem that P-chan offers is that everything had to be on his terms, he never met you even half-way. It was “my way or the highway” with P-chan, he was right and everyone else could go to hell. No wonder we left him alone. 

When I was working at Yamatake one time I was sent to the CEO’s office to do an interview and Ido-san was brusque if not dismissive. I slated this down to office politics because my work unit had sort of fallen into the class of being sponsored by a man in the company at a senior rank who’d been a competitor of Ido-san’s before Ido-san became CEO, and old animosities die hard I understand that. At the end of our ten minutes together he said that I should go back to Australia so my father could see his grandchildren. Ido-san knew my father they’d done business together. But though I would eventually go back it wasn’t voluntarily. 

I have spent most of my life trying to maintain a sense of agency.

TEFA started in late May and finished in early September but in reality because of the triggering nature of the exercise it’d been going on since 2019, when I went out of my way to buy dry-mount photo albums and sticky corners. I’d had them gathering dust in a cupboard.

On 8 Sept the day after sending TEFA to Japan I had regrets and wished I could’ve spent more time making it because I felt like an opportunity had been lost. My purpose in making TEFA had all along been – like with ‘Reminiscences’ – to capture and preserve. It seemed important to me because once a person is dead their memories are also lost unless they have first been captured somewhere in some recorded form, like a family photo album or a memoir, or else handed down via spoken stories. I’d lost so much when mum died, every week there were things I wanted to ask her but couldn’t. I didn’t want other people to feel my loss.

I missed my mother.

I was hard on dad in TEFA.

I miss my mother.

On 8 Sept I wrote a poem about memory, by this time in my life I had lived so long and had done so many things that it felt natural to talk about driving in the car in the mid-80s. I put nothing about that Ford Laser in TEFA, there were many things that I had left out. I comforted myself with the knowledge that my family would at least look through the album and discuss it, perhaps, among themselves. It seemed like the appropriate way to deal with life.

On 7 Sept I went to Sydney Contemporary and met with Mark Ferguson, who I knew from back in the 1980s, he was a friend of a work colleague. Nowadays he’s like me much involved in the art world, perhaps more than me. I got my invitation to the show from a northern rivers artist I bought collages from in about 2013. I don’t know where he got his invite from he told me but I forgot. On the way back home I caught the bus on Regent Street, here’s the cars streaming down the road from the CBD with their lights on, as they come over the rise their lights shine in your eyes momentarily until they pass by and go on toward Henderson Rd.

A busy stretch of road the council has just improved by inserting into it a new set of traffic lights for a pedestrian crossing south of where the photo stabs. The photo was taken looking north, the bus comes up the hill and pauses taking on passengers ready to progress down the road, I get on  the bus and ride it all the way to Botany and then get off it at my street, I’m usually the only person to get off there. Regent Street is quite another kettle of fish there are usually dozens of passengers waiting to get onto any number of different buses but I wish they’d put in a train line.

On 20 Sept I subscribed to X (formerly Twitter) it’s a bit of a process you have to add a form of ID, I used my diver’s license. The camera on the PC tries to take snapshots of the back and front of the card, it takes a bit of time to get things aligned properly. The reason I did this is because I saw a news item on the Guardian website saying that Musk would make all users subscribe and since I knew someone else badly wanted my handle I got in before it could be taken away. 

On this day Adelaide held her 100 days’ celebration at a restaurant in Yokohama (see photo below). I didn’t have any new videos to share so sent snapshots to some people instead. One friend said that Henri will be a chick magnet when he’s bigger.

I started ‘Dark alphabet’ on 22 Sept and finished the watercolour part two days later, thinking to add collage. I asked for advice on Instagram but got no response. By the end of the month I’d finished the entire thing and had it laid out on the floor for contemplation it was a mammoth task but I pulled through, the Posca marks I did in one session one after the other all 24 panels.

On 26 Sept I went to the framers to specify the items for the exhibition, there were 13 of them and I paid a deposit. The exhibition would be held in early Nov, with the opening party on the 2nd. 

My visit to the framers was to pick up some things I’d specified for my own use, and included things mum had drawn in the 50s and 60s. One of these things is a set of evening party cartoons that I got framed 4-up (four in one frame) and sent to Japan. Another was a set of drawings as photocopies for a fashion designer named Chris Jacovides (see pic below).

I chose a pink fillet for this item to add a feminine refinement, and a gold-and-black frame to give it distinction. Mum was a reader of fashion magazines all her life, I grew up with copies of Vogue hanging around the house (as well as House & Garden), and she sold fashion in her shop. I remember vacuuming the change room which was surrounded by dresses, not a curtain (the dresses were the curtain), the soft drapery of the garments adding mystique to a daily chore during school holidays. Mum was an inveterate communicator and had been the school magazine editor in her final year, she had also worked as a commercial artist for some time after matriculating. I do wonder if she was paid for her drawings or if she did it as a favour to a friend.

There were other items including a drawing of my brother when he was about 3 years old, and a photo of mum aged about 18. I have these in the hallway on the first floor where there were spaces. Another item still to pick up as the month turned over was a photo of P-chan as a small boy (see photo below).

End of year memorial: August

On 1 Aug I bought an Elanor chair from Plush because Ming said I needed an armchair in the living room downstairs, and Simon from the art group worked in a furniture store. Simon helpfully made up a quote and emailed it to the Esag account so I paid a deposit. Much cheaper than the place I’d been used to getting furniture from and from whom I’d bought my couch, plus with only a deposit needed on order I didn’t do too much immediate damage to my credit card. I’d just gotten a refund because the night before I orchestrated a purchase of clothes for Adelaide. One of her retailers had a sale but stupidly I picked the wrong colour for one item – a top – so had to cancel the order as international orders with Lucy & Yak cannot be changed. This is what the chair looked like when it was delivered (not in Aug) after a time lag of about 12 weeks. I put it here in Aug because I didn’t make a note of it when it arrived. You can see it looks a bit like a bear (Ming’s description).

The art show came together and on 2 Aug I paid the rental fee to Annie the gallerist. Simon organised for us to go to the gallery the following week to discuss preparations, and I asked Simon when Billy Lake’s works could be collected (she planned to go away). I did some weeding on 4 Aug because the yellow nutgrass threatened to spread in my lawn which had grown ragged with lack of care. On 1 Aug I’d also picked up the Etch-A-Sketch I’d purchased on Amazon for Henri, this was a request from his mother, who remembered using one of these toys when she was small, and on the 5th I realised I’d need to go and buy more coffee. I still hadn’t heard from the print shop or from the framers (both of them) but on two days around this time I had a couple of conversations with Adelaide and her mother about where Ada and Ryo and Henri should move to to be closer to Yukiko, who was providing critical support for the family. They canvassed possibilities including renting or buying an apartment.

On 8 Aug I went with Graeme Cordiner of Sydney Friends of Myall Creek to visit the shadow minister for Aboriginal affairs at Parliament House, which was interesting. It was a bit stressful getting through the security apparatus but I survived unmolested. The building is under renovation so I entered through underground and walked upstairs to get to the lobby where I waited. After leaving Graeme on Elizabeth Street following the meeting I caught the bus to Newtown to get my coffee, then on the way back home went to Broadway Shopping Centre to pick up mail. I also bought some low-carb snacks there. The letter in the mail when I got home was a nice surprise because it seems that the insurance company under which I’d cashed in my life insurance policy had decided to change the way they calculate the value of policies so I would receive extra money.

I spoke with Ada and her mother on 9 Aug and saw the activity gym I’d sent for Henri on 24 Jul. When it had initially arrived in Japan the bolts for putting it together had been missing so I’d been forced to go to Kmart again, contacting the service desk in person and asking, with the help of a photo of the receipt Ada sent, for what I needed, which the clerk behind the counter kindly supplied. I picked out some more soft toys with attachment rings and mailed them off. When they arrived in Yokohama Ada put the thing together and I saw a video of Henri playing with it. It’s hard to classify the feelings I have when looking at my grandson, he seems sort of unreal possibly because I don’t have to look after him, though when Yukiko and I do Zoom convos with Ada and Henri it can go on for a long time; luckily Ada has a Zoom account.

I got so busy for the rest of Aug what with the art show (see pics below) and making a family photo album that I called ‘The Enormous Family Album’. The art show ran from 17 to 20 Aug inclusive and I was in the gallery each day giving out room sheets to potential customers. We had one woman who showed an interest in Simon’s work but though she came in twice and sent her husband once the transaction never materialised.

End of year memorial: July

On 4 July I started using the new TweetDeck again because the classic version was ballsed-up and on 8 July I worked out the secret of Nabokov’s ‘Ada’ having read widely and having, in recently weeks, spent time with ‘The Blacklist’ a crime drama starring James Spader. The next day Basia went to the Blue Mountains and I dropped her off at Central Station. A few days later she went to Newcastle to be with friends so I had more time alone. I got a file from Stephen Whiteside a cousin on 14 July it was a set of reminiscences of about 20 pages made by great-aunt Madge including scenes from her childhood in Victoria in the teens of last century. It was especially poignant as it contained stories about my Henri’s great-great-grandfather Harry Dean, who I never met, along with rendered ideas about what it meant to be a child in the first half of the 20th Century. I sent the file to my family in Japan as well as to my brother and cousins then I set about organising the family photo explanations mum had made for me in 2008 or 09 when I was still in Sydney or when I had just moved to Queensland to look after her I think it was both it took a long time to get the captions made.

I understood things about myself so it was clear to me why I’d had to wait from July 2016 when mum died until July 2023 to get around to observing at close hand these photos and the associated text. It also took some work because mum’s handwriting is not always clear, and I spent a couple of days transcribing, saving the document to PDF before sharing with family and friends. Cousin Trish Allen told me that Madge’s recount had been made on the instigation of Uncle Geoff but as a young man – it had been finished by about 1979 – I never knew of its existence. Trish told me furthermore that it was Madge’s document that had started her (Trish) off on her own project, a short family genealogical history of the Deans. 

As well as ‘The Enormous Family Album’ (TEFA; see later in this memorial) in July 2023 I finished organising mum’s reminiscences, making an album. The photos below are from the album in question.

Above, what mum called her “domestic goddess” shot. Mum and her brother Geoff made these imaginative scenarios using a family camera. This is fabulous, like a Cindy Sherman.

Above: mum and her mother Bea in the CBD of Melbourne in the 50s.

Above: mum on her birthday one year looking grumpy.

Above: mum dressed up as a fairy for a school event.

Above: mum with snapdragons.

This project actually started in 2008 when I was living in Sydney before my move to Queensland. I had some family photos mum had sent and had photocopied them onto A4 sheets sending them back with an order to mum to write notes about each of them. It took a lot of prodding over a number of years – it wouldn’t have happened unless I kept nagging mum to sit down with a pen and write about each photo – before she completed this task, presumably in odd moments. It was when she was living in Beach Parade in her groundfloor unit; I do remember mentioning the task to her on occasion if I went over to make dinner (which I did every evening you must keep in mind).

It was in July that I got the notes in mum’s lovely fluid handwriting and transcribed them into an MS-Word file, then made an album with, for each of the photos, (1) the photo (2) the handwritten notes on blue or yellow paper and (3) the transcription. When I was making TEFA I also added to the ‘Reminiscences’ with sticky corners the appropriate photo in each case so the final product is layered and complex with artefacts betraying the existence of a process of construction that happened over time, in fact a number of years. I even didn’t order (much like TEFA) the photos chronologically, just leaving them in the order in which they presented themselves to me as I was making the thing. This contingent surprise might be destabilising for a reader, I appreciate that, but the degree of discomfort that such a state of affairs inspires in the casual peruser of the Reminiscences must be allowed to invoke the degree of discomfort that TEFA and the album inspired in me.

It wasn’t easy to go back there. You have to keep in mind that, as I mention elsewhere in this memorial, I am the last of the Joao Luis da Silvas to live in Australia. After me there will be nobody, the children and grandchildren growing up in other countries. This sort of displacement involves naturally a degree of pain. Something must’ve happened to make this situation real, it isn’t out of a sense of perversity (or maybe it is) that I left in disarray the order of entries in mum’s fantastic Reminiscences, that I allowed casual contingency to put its mark on TEFA, which has now BEEN SENT TO JAPAN as it is there that it can have most meaning. Fewer people in Australia are able to understand TEFA and the Reminiscences. The race of readers located potentially in Australia has been almost exterminated by forces beyond my control. Obviously if I had been able to preserve the traces of that forgotten people I would have done so, but it was not to be. They have migrated. I am part of a race of travellers. Where we will eventually end up is a matter for Fate and the Gods of jet propulsion to decide. It is not my choice any more.

The thing about the photos was that mum had never explained details of her life as she lived it  before moving to Sydney in 1962. Not with any with much completeness. In fact I had prior to reading her notes only the most basic knowledge of her Depression and War years. I find it hard to accommodate the feelings of disappointment I feel when faced wtih this lacuna, and ask just how hard would it have been to colour in the gaps in us boys’ knowledge of a formative time for the person we relied on most in our lives? Perhaps mum was ashamed of her associations in the years around 1945 when she was reaching maturity. Perhaps dad was jealous. Certainly from reading the notes I can see that she was an intelligent and spirited and independent-minded person. Perhaps dad was jealous of her boyfriends so she couldn’t talk about anything related to that time. I just regret that I didn’t do more while she was alive to preserve the past as documents.

On 19 July I contacted one of the clothing suppliers I had paid for goods to be delivered to my daughter because the package hadn’t arrived. In fact I’d left the wrong address when making the transaction online. The next day I went to Broadway Shopping Centre to get the car washed and picked up the rest of the Rousseau posters I’d bought. I also did some grocery shopping, bought petrol and picked up a newspaper to read while I waited for the car washing to finish. I’d gotten to the end of season eight of ‘The Blacklist’ and was feeling strangely melancholy, I had in fact brought along to read N Mailer’s ‘Harlot’s Ghost’ but in the end compensated for the feeling of boredom I had by reading a couple of stories in ‘The Australian’ it was enough to fill up a quarter hour or so of unclaimed time.

I dreamed of Pixie O’Harris on the night of 23 July and also of cutting shapes out of paper with scissors, shapes so complex I wished for finer scissors. When I woke up I realised that all those years ago my silent pleas for help had gone nowhere. I used to visit Pixie on the way back from mum and dad’s house on Sunday night going back to St Paul’s College where I lived in 1981. I would sit for a long time talking or not talking and I remember that Pixie must’ve gotten annoyed with me when I didn’t leave, they were probably tired by late evening and wanted free time before going to bed, but I just sat there looking morose. It occurs to me that Pixie never asked me if I still wanted to study literature, I did not want to, I wanted to be a painter, but it was necessary to complete the Arts degree to appease dad and because if I chose to be a painter it could only happen with the support of my family and doing that would’ve potentially involved dad spending money, something he had a natural aversion to. 

Nobody thought badly of my father I think though some family members had reservations (Uncle Geoff and cousin Chris’ wife Paula said things within my hearing once or twice). These were reservations that on occasion one of them might discuss quietly with me I seem to remember, but the general sense of most people in my world at that time – so long ago memories flit about like butterflies in a storm – is that people thought that dad was a good father when he was a manipulative gaslighting bully who always got his way. A malignant narcissist is more likely to tend to shut down discussion, at least serious discussion (jokes aside) by controlling the tone or direction of the conversation. If my art teacher said nothing when I told him I had to keep doing French because of the timetable clash in Year 11 then nobody in the family was going to risk incurring my father’s wrath by mentioning the fact that I loved drawing and was talented and that I should be given the chance to find my future in art.

Even in 2023 my dreams point me in the way I should have gone all those years – decades of boredom, failure, and suffering – all those years ago, those years! How hard it was how hard I tried to fit the mould set out by my father intent on making me into his own image. Of course I crashed. I burned, and now I need three different medications daily just to stay something like normal, and small exertion makes my heart race like I’m being pursued by a bear, and I cannot drive on many roads out of fear. I certainly won’t risk flying by plane to see my grandson so have to wait until the family comes here so that I see his little face. I routinely have to put up with people’s prying questions about this inability to fly – for why would a grandfather absent himself from his grandson’s side? – and I have to think up strategies to enable me to avoid such routines, they make me feel like a freak or as if I am disabled. Not that there’s anything wrong with being disabled (which I am) it’s just that I barely cope with this type of scrutiny from probably well-meaning humans. I get along better with dogs.

The irony is that if I tell people of my suffering they immediately try to downplay its severity, possibly on account of my circumstances. Yet this is who I am. I am a man who has been everything but mortally damaged by someone whose first duty was in fact to protect him just like I protect my own children, and now my grandson Henri whom I babysat from overseas in July via Zoom.

Yukiko, Ada, Henri and I did a four-way Zoom conversation on several occasions in July sometimes with me singing songs such as ‘Waltzing Matilda’ making him fall asleep. Another favourite – from my point of view at least – was ‘C’era una volta un piccolo naviglio’ which I learned when I was a teacher with COASIT back in 1985 teaching primary school students Italian. I still had the song on mute in my head to use whenever I wanted, so it came in handy because Henri didn’t like to be left on the floor alone and uncared-for. He likes to be with people.

End of year memorial: June

I went with Simon on 2 June to the Art Centre of Sydney to talk about the show and the following Monday the gallerist cancelled it, it’s still not clear why but it probably came down to an assessment of financial return. I was looking after Ming and Omer for much of the following week but did go to the framers to cancel the second lot of pictures for the show and got a partial refund (see photo below for one of the items in my bedroom above my desk; this would eventually be sent to Japan to hang in the family home there). On 9 June I went into town to drop off some negatives at Pixel Perfect so I could get proof sheets and maybe see about possible prints, and also went to Myer to buy trousers. In the afternoon I continued looking for newspaper cuttings for my planned album and miraculously found what I was looking for in my filing cabinet. In addition to the clipping about Emily Kewish and the footballers I found three cuttings about her brother-in-law Robert James. Emily was RJ’s sister. 

It was a surprise to locate the clipping after all the years spent trying to forget the pain of losing my way, and I also continued on my endeavours to assemble a collection of photos for albums to send to Japan. For these I would need captions, and I found relevant material in the filing cabinet, communications between my parents and their niece, who seems to have taken over my filial duties in my absence during the nineties. 

In the evening I took some things over to Ming’s place and sat with her for an hour or so chatting, she is currently on a quest to discover facts about her grandfather, he was a Communist from way back but was abandoned by the Party causing a good deal of grief for his family. He survived until 1999 however and Ming is his residual effect, she is dogged in her quest. I admire her fortitude and know because of the tears that his story creates sometimes the journey is not without its difficulties. Her case is different from mine in that the people of her parents’ generation are still alive, many of them, so she is in the possibly fortunate possibly unfortunate position of being able to speak with people who knew her grandfather, who was born in 1922. My own grandparents were born a generation earlier and my mother’s father died in 1954, the year mum and dad got engaged. Joao Luis was left behind in Melbourne when the family migrated to the Big Smoke of Sydney so I have only the sketchiest memories of my paternal grandfather.

I found the photos of my parents’ engagement party which was held at a house in Glen Eira Road, Caulfield. It was the Deans’ old house and for financial reasons Bea, my mother’s mother, was forced to sell it after husband Harry died, probably because he didn’t leave her enough money to live on, dad never forgot this failing and was skimpy with money all his life, I have lists of expenses in typewritten form, from mum and dad’s time in Queensland where they went to live out their last years.

That apartment will be in my album there are many gorgeous photos taken from the balcony overlooking the estuary. A long way from Wattletree Road, Armadale where Bea went after selling the house she’d brought up her children in. The following map shows the two locations, the southernmost one being the old Dean house and the second northernmost one being where Bea ended up living near the train line, I remember the sound of the train at night when my brother and I slept over at Bea’s house on the rare occasion mum took us south by intercity train during school holidays.

I submitted a picture to Bonhams for a valuation in preparation for sale at auction on 12 June, a Danish painting my great-uncle Elmer owned which was bought in New Zealand, probably on order as Elmer was a proud Dane. I had put the same painting up for sale on Facebook Marketplace but got no queries, it’s a landscape showing a house and trees, quite a dark tonal realist oil painting that I’d had cleaned about a decade ago when I lived in Qld. 

The day before I found hundreds of precious photos I had thought had been lost irretrievably, photos from the 80s and 90s that are a part of me and that represent the first stage of artistic practice in my era of wage-slavery. Photography has this ability to free the artist because instead of needing a studio you can carry your studio with you (“camera” means “room” in Italian) anywhere you want to take your roving attention and its accompanying processing brain. 

I stuck hundreds of photos into an album.

In 2019 when I bought the albums it had been four years since I’d moved south from Queensland. Now, in 2023, it was seven years since mum died and three years since moving to Botany that I finally got organised so that I could take on a huge task. To stick one photo or label down you need four corners, each of which has an adhesive back, and for the refound photos I used more than two packets, each packet containing 1000 corners.

The big news of the year emerged on 14 June when Ada’s baby was born at 49cm and 3.7kg after 26 hours of labour. They induced on the Tuesday and it hurt too much so in the evening they stopped and resumed the next morning. After going to the delivery room the child took minutes to emerge. Everyone greatly relieved. Ada’s mother kept me apprised of events on Messenger so I was up-to-date at all times. I told family and friends and Tony Macris videoed me on Wed night to have a chat which was nice. My brother said, “So smol” and my cousin Clare said that mum would’ve been beside herself with excitement. Clare also said that the child has long, artistic fingers and passed the news of the birth onto her brothers. I had ”likes” from family in Portugal as well as “congratulations” from people in Sydney who I’ve met over the years. I was just relieved that the ordeal was finally over and that mother and baby were ok.

In the photos the child looks healthy with lots of dark hair and a forehead that looks like his father’s. Yukiko told me that his eyes look like his mother’s when they’re open, in the photo I had it was hard to see the eyes, but his nose looked strong. I had one photo of the child on Ada’s chest just after parturition and another photo of the father holding baby. There was also a photo of the infant solo with his eyes closed.

I had an email from Bonhams on the same evening regarding the Danish painting, I was looking to raise money because of the expenses I’d had in terms of framing. Bonhams declined as in Australia they only sell Australian art and my painting was Danish. It wouldn’t suit their London auction protocols as it wasn’t valuable enough to ship. They gave me the contact details of two local auction houses that might be interested and I sent an email to one of them the next day requesting an estimate of value.

A kind of settlement came on 16 June when I went to the ultrasound clinic with Omer and Ming who discovered that she would have to have a termination. I’d finished the big photo album that I’d been making. Apart from the trip to the city it took about three days straight just sticking down the thin little transparent plastic corners. This was part of a larger project in which I was organising family photos to make an album for Japan, using prints in a chest of drawers that had been sitting untouched in the studio since I moved house in 2020. In fact I hadn’t done anything with the photos since mum died in 2016, that event still quite fresh in memory I felt as if I’d never get over it. On the day I came home from the city with Ming and Omer I stopped off at Pixel Perfect to get proof sheets, then at home had a look through and made another trip to Chippendale to order things printed. On 17 and 18 June I went through digitised slides on my computer and placed a large number in a USB drive so I could get them printed too.

At around this time 85 Bay Street Botany was up for lease (see pic), a wood cottage they’d had workmen in to paint and spruce it up the front verandah. The guy who’d previously rented the house was a scavenger he’d collect junk from who-knows-where and place scads of it on his front lawn. I’d sometimes grab something on my way past, plates or wine. I wondered what had happened to make the tenant leave his home. 

Ming got home from the hospital on the same day as Ada, and the next day I drove to Davidson Auctions in Annandale with two paintings I inherited from Uncle Elmer. Space is at a premium in my house, I told the valuer, received my receipt, and got in the car on busy Parramatta Road to get home. Omer had destroyed my front door lock so on this day (20 June) I called locksmiths, some I’d been in touch with hadn’t replied, and I found a place in the CBD, sending photos I took of the front door. Joe from the locksmiths suggested a Samsung, I told him I didn’t care as long as it doesn’t break, and he laughed. 

He called up a bit later as I was preparing lunch and asked if he could come out straight away, and I consented. He installed the lock and adjusted it so it would be easy to open, then showed me how to program it including the biometric function. I tried paying with a credit card but it didn’t work so we tramped upstairs and did the transfer on my computer, I told him I don’t do mobile phone transfers because I hate technology it always lets you down. It turned out he knows a friend of Joe Toubia’s and as I drove out to visit Ming he was crossing back over the road to talk with my neighbour standing in the driveway with someone.

On 21 June I paid my car registration which had gone up since the last time. I thought about all the car insurance ads for this company or that company and how clever they are with their little dramas, their music, and their pitches. I knew that ‘Gruen’ was coming back on the TV in 2023, it’s a favourite show of mine I love the way it dissects commerce down to its component parts it’s so incisive and informative. Trust the ABC to run such an oddball show, a show purely about TV adverts.

The day before I had had a revelation finding an old school magazine of Methodist Ladies’ College from the 40s mum had a poem and a drawing in it, the drawing had the map of Australia as a cloud and the poem, which was published when she was just 16, done in the style of Rupert Brooke. Naturally mum apologised to the poet in her subtitle, polite as always. The poem is about things she loves and it had me in awe, I was standing in the back bedroom on the first floor thinking about all the opportunity lost when this woman was made to run a gift shop all her life selling knickknacks to bored housewives instead of creating things. I’d also about this time put up scans of some ink drawings, cartoons mum made in the 50s and people were amazed, I had so many comments from friends and acquaintances. I felt a deep sense of regret as well as outrage. I sent the cartoons to Japan later on.

Some days before on 16 Jun Simon had just sent an application to Laerk Space in Newtown and had spoken on the phone with Annie the proprietor. He was aiming for an exhibition and said it might be possible to hold one on 6 July and on 26 June he messaged saying that she would be away on that week and that perhaps another week in July might work. I had my hopes up for an opportunity to show work publicly. What I stopped waiting for on 21 June was the name of my grandson, Anri, Henri 安浬 a lovely peaceful name full of hope. Henry’s great-great-grandfather’s name was John Henry Dean, he was known as Harry he died in 1952 and I never knew him but he was by all reports a lovely man. Henri is made up of “calm” (an) and “nautical mile” (ri) so “a calm stretch of sea” but on the weekend Ada complained to her mother about the baby not sleeping so Yukiko went over to her place to help out.

In my quest to give Japan a family album I asked a cousin in Portugal, Maria Celeste Bernardo, to provide names for a bunch of snapshots dad had put in granny’s records. I don’t know why he put them in a folder labelled with her name since she’d left Joao Luis in 1962 and then lived with us in Sydney but there you have it, I guess it was just dad’s way of keeping things organised, things that even tangentially belonged to granny had to be stuck in a folder labelled “Phyllis” and I wasn’t about to complain I had the snapshots after all.

Maria Celeste got back to me with names for about 30 photos, and I stuck the labels down on the morning of 24 June in preparation for making the album. I still had to get photos back from Pixel Perfect and anticipated they’d come the following week but that turned out to be premature.

My friend Basia came to stay in early July I picked her up from the airport on the first of the month. We had long chats and looked at my photo album (the one recently made, not TEFA). On 4 July we drove to Annandale to drop off two paintings I wanted to sell, visiting the auction house, then I dropped her off at the university and drove home. I also got an exciting email from the courier company used by the retailer of the clothes I bought for Henri online. A funny thing happened with this purchase that took up a lot of my time, I did the PayPal thing wrong and was debited on my cheque account twice because PayPal doesn’t work like regular banks. I felt it was my fault but when I think about it the messaging from PayPal was deficient.

End of year memorial: May

On 1 May Simon told me he’d entered a piece for the Waverley Art Prize, he’d just been unsuccessful getting hung with the Sulman finalists. I took items to the framers in Alexandria on 10 May, I’d just done another series for the show and we needed some things to photograph to send to the gallery for promotional purposes. The framer said they’d have them done by 31 May.

Ming and Omer came over on 11 May to eat dinner with materials they brought with them, so I had a treat. They also picked up a doona because the weather had turned very cold and I dropped them back in Wolli Creek after we watched ‘Clash of the Titans’.

I didn’t do any painting at this point in time but instead found a creative outlet writing poems. I also started to go through the drawers-full of photos mum had left when she died, there were thousands of them. I got out the albums I’d bought online in 2019 when I had been tidying up the library in the old apartment in Pyrmont, I still had the sticky corners for photos in a box on a shelf in the cupboard. Going through old photos was traumatic and after I did it for about two hours I was completely exhausted and stopped for several days.

On 26 May one of these off-days Amanda Edds the framer came to drop off some things she’d finished, including an old family heirloom, an embroidery made sometime in the 19th century probably, it’s a shame that mum never mentioned it because now it’s complete and preserved in acrylic and with its own lovely gold frame but it has little context apart from its unique Biblical elements. Well, unique in a way particular to my generation because I’m sure lots of women in the 19th century spent time making Biblical quotes as embroidery. I also got back a flag, a blue Peter, which great-uncle Elmer’s workmates had given him when he retired, he was a tugboat skipper I think, in Auckland Harbour. I put it in the first-floor hallway at this time but later in the year it’d move to a better place upstairs in the studio where it is further away from viewers. It needs space to be seen properly.

I bought more hooks because Ming was still putting things up on her walls and needed some. Amanda put in some D-rings for Ming under my guidance, two lovely watercolours Ming’d made in 2021 and that she wanted to have on her walls now. I gave Ming two photo frames that Amanda also put D-rings in so my friend could hang a photo of her grandmother on her wall, as well as a landscape showing where her grandfather’s house had been in Hunan.

On 27 May I was unable to fit into the trousers I wanted to wear for the day because I’d put on too much weight, so told myself it was finally time to get more pants. I was due to pick up the exhibition watercolours from Frame Today in Alexandria also, so promised myself to go later into town to buy clothes but in the end I did not go.

This is the embroidery a quote from the Bible Deuteronomy 33.27, it’s very warlike a section about a boy called Asher, the pictured verse goes like this:

The eternal God is your refuge,

    and underneath are the everlasting arms.

He will drive out your enemies before you,

    saying, ‘Destroy them!’

Wow, back in the old days the Dean women were tough (if it was a Dean it might’ve been a Kewish Macarthur Mcguigan etc). This is part of the Old Testament, it’s part of the Torah. I’m amazed and wonder who this woman was who left such an object. The chapter goes on to say:

So Israel will live in safety;

    Jacob will dwell secure

in a land of grain and new wine,

    where the heavens drop dew.

Blessed are you, Israel!

    Who is like you,

    a people saved by the Lord?

He is your shield and helper

    and your glorious sword.

Your enemies will cower before you,

    and you will tread on their heights.”

Who was Asher? “Asher was the eighth son of Jacob, and his name means ‘Blessed’ or ‘Happy’” eventually Asher and his brothers, angered by Jacob’s preferential treatment of Joseph, sold Joseph into slavery in Egypt where he went on to reach a high station. It’s sort of like ‘The Bold and the Beautiful’ except no photo or video record in those days not even the very ancient technology of newspapers.

What interests me is the idea of prophesy, the fact that before Moses died it was decided by God that the Israelites should live in Judea, like who on earth could know that long ago? When I visited Israel in 2019 with Ming I became at least somewhat informed where before I’d had no parameters upon which to base my understanding of the region, we also went to Amman and then on to Istanbul. Back in Sydney having moved house I stuck the explanation I made on my desktop computer to the back of the embroidery using stickytape, a thoroughly modern technology, newer than newspapers. This was on 28 May and wasn’t done in a vacuum as I also attended to providing context for other things that had arrived from the framers, typing up labels and sticking them to the backs of other items also.

Some of them had been made a (long) time before, including a drawing made in June 2014 on paper with crayons. In the ensuing years it got destroyed with all the moving of houses so when I turned back with the intention of having it on my wall I had to use a JPG that I’d providentially put onto my computer and that I could use to make prints out of.

There were other prints that were from an even moment, in fact 2007/08 when I was settling back into a rhythm in Sydney after my catastrophically disastrous Japan sojourn. Now, in 2023, I typed up labels to go on the back of the works that had originally been made in Photoshop then had luckily been saved to JPGs.

Also on the Sunday I went to have lunch with Omer and Ming, Omer cooked zucchini and tuna pasta. Then I shot back home to meet with other friends, Yianni and Christine, the latter of whom had left her husband’s motor scooter to store in my garage. 

Christine had wanted to come over to start it up to keep the battery viable. Initially we couldn’t start the thing but then Yianni said why not look up on the internet to see if there might be instructions and we found a video which told her to hold down the brake while operating the ignition switch, and it worked so we wheeled the thing out to the street and Christine ran it for about 20 minutes. Christine and I talked about my new items as well as old ones including Pixie’s abstract in the middle bedroom on the first floor which Basia hates. 

On 30 May I went to pick up the hooks from my post office box and got the car cleaned, then drove out to Bexley to drop off some things. I promptly went home and ate food then Ming called and asked me to pick up printer ink from the shop, so I drove out to do that and dropped off in addition some spare hooks when Omer met me on the street so that I didn’t have to park. Unfortunately in the evening my regular Tues shows weren’t on due to the French Open taking up bandwidth so I instead watched ‘Bull’ and ‘The Inspector Lynley Mysteries’ on one of the Ten Network digital channels. 

End of year memorial: April

On 1 and 2 Apr I was still making abstract paintings (see below) the watercolour drying while I read a book or watched TV I realised on 3 Apr that all this working was leading to a new kind of anxiety related to the sense of loss I felt at all the abandoned years, I was neglecting myself not brushing my teeth not showering every night the sense of shame due to the loss – was it my fault was I too weak not to stand up to my father, what a petal and yes snowflake – making me punish myself as a proxy for punishing him, he was dead these ten years oh God I exploited this sense of abandonment (even when he was alive he was never patient with me) in my artmaking, looking for ways to create drama, something we all need we manufacture it when it’s absent it makes us feel wanted needed real.

I skip a couple of weeks, during one of which I was completing 2022 series of paintings and looking after Ming as Omer had Covid. Then I got Covid, though not very badly at first. I took the RAT on 17 Apr in the evening, having made it successfully down the road to the pharmacy. Overnight it was difficult as I had an elevated heart rate for extended periods of time. Probably got to sleep at 10pm and got up at 4am and made pu-erh tea which is mild. I didn’t want to have too much caffeine in such an isolated situation tho I thought about making coffee for an instant, abandoning the idea in favour of what I thought was a less vigorous morning drink.

Being upright and plugged into the internet helped keep my heart calm, and the palpitations that had been bothering me were gone by 4.20am by which time I was set up in front of the computer. Lying in bed I had thought about calling an ambulance but it’s such a rigmarole and in any case I knew what had to be done, promising myself to go back to the pharmacy when it opened to get medication to offset the virus.

While I was sleeping my daughter sent me a message of encouragement, but what I mostly took comfort from is that Ming’s pregnancy hadn’t failed due to her infection. As I was going to sleep I thought about this aspect of my life, and it gave me a core to pin my hopes on, a fulcrum upon which my dizzy world might sensibly turn. Adelaide’s news – that the child she was carrying would be a boy – also provided structure for part of my difficulties tho regarding the gender of the child either way I didn’t have a preference. I spoke with Basia about these things when I got up we talked for about an hour until 6am covering a range of topics from ‘The Bold and the Beautiful’ to her former mother-in-law. 

I coped with the intricacies of the discussion without losing track of threads of conversation so evidently brain fog wasn’t a problem. The next night was better and I slept for abt 12 hours with a break for food at 2am. The following night I went to bed at about 7pm and slept right through to 5am. On one of these days I spoke with my psychiatrist about the tea and he advised me to cut down so I found a packet of caffein-free chai a houseguest had left and had some of that on 19 Apr. Then at the pharmacy when picking up my antivirals I bought more similar blends so I’d have in stock something that I could add milk to.

Yukiko got the security camera installed on 20 Apr (see pics below) and said she now feels safe also with the dog Epo who barks whenever someone comes to the front door.

The feed goes online then to Yukiko’s phone so she can see remotely if someone comes up to the house from the street. There had been a spate of attacks on women in Tokyo which had prompted her to ask for help, and I paid for this security upgrade. 

I sent Yukiko some items I’d had framed locally at a different framer from normal. I sometimes use a local framer if there’s an urgent job that needs doing, in this case I didn’t want to have these delicate paper artworks sitting around the house and potentially getting damaged.

This artwork has a bull theme and it’s dated 2009. It’s by Rozee Cutrone who swapped some things for some of mine earlier in the year. I packed it up using an old box I got from one of the March garden pots picked up on the northern beaches in Ensign. I also packed up some paintings of mine that’d been framed at the same time (see below).

I’m not sure who will get these, if my daughter will want them (she’s really into zodiac) but they’re on the way now. Packaging for the pictures came also from the storage room downstairs, I have some old cardboard that is just sitting there and cut some of that up. 

It’s good to recycle.

I got the message on 27 Apr that the packages had arrived in Yokohama and that the paintings look different in real life than they do online. By this time I’d spoken with the framer about her schedule and she promised to come out with more things the next week. Simon had also settled the booking for the Art Centre of Sydney for a group show including me so I sent out messages to all my friends hoping they’d attend the opening.

Ming’s situation hadn’t changed so I was immensely happy – it settled in my bones – that her pregnancy was going ok. I dropped off some things at her place on the 27th including food and some of Omer’s documents that had been stored in my front room. Omer met me downstairs on the street when I arrived in Ensign and I handed over the bags then drove home.

For the art show I paid the gallery’s fee in advance planning to get the other participants – Simon Kahn, Billy Lake and Bruno Valente – to pay me back their share, it was easier to do it this way so that the gallerist didn’t have to wait for all of us to get money organised separately.

Simon said he’d come over on Saturday to discuss the show as we still had to agree on a theme and after a short discussion we came up with ‘Colour as a Plot Device’. Over the next couple of days I didn’t do any painting and instead focused on choosing what works to include in the show.

I tested negative on 30 Apr, it had been 14 days since testing positive the first time and I was relieved to finally get a better result. In fact I’d gone out in the morning to do shopping and bought RATs at Chemist Warehouse on Botany Road because I didn’t have any unopened kits when I woke up. I’d sort of planned to go to a show opening on Sunday afternoon but in the end I stayed home sorting through paintings which I laid out on the dining table in order to see them better.

End of year memorial: March

On 2 and 3 Mar I got the zodiac sign’s text file ready with the colours appropriate for each one, Adelaide told me what they are and I asked her innocently who decided such things. It seemed strange to associate colours with individual star signs but I guess that nothing is beyond the realm of possibility when it comes to the horoscope.

Or life. On 2 Mar I went to the National Art School to see the Queer Art show in which Christine Dean is featured, see the entry for Feb where there’s a reference to this artist. The show was interesting and I particularly liked the works by Emily Parsons-Lord which are made of pigments burned onto paper giving a nice fluttery effect like smoke. In the evening I made an error leaving a show opening before the gathering broke up as I’d told someone we’d be there (Simon and I) but Simon didn’t come and the person I met, Bernadette, left at about 6.30pm. I’m not very sociable so being surrounded by people who are ignoring you, as people tend to do at art shows, is a kind of torture so I left just after 7pm. Anthony turned up near to 8 o’clock and messaged me but by this time I was home in front of the TV. 

The following day I suffered on account of the mix-up, though the day before had been productive with two watercolours completed (see below). The first of these is the second one I made, it’s ‘You reap what you sow’ or in Japanese “mi kara deta sabi” (“rust from the body”).

The next painting says ‘A waste of breath’ or “uma no mimi ni nembutsu” (“chanting in a horse’s ear”). There are tons of “kotowaza” in Japanese reminding me of how as a young man I’d thought about writing a novel where everything the protagonist says is a saying. In Japanese something that is “waza to” is deliberate and “koto” means “thing”.

Utilitarian speech. On the day I started planning the zodiac series I had no idea I’d wake up full of foreboding, but it was anyway a Friday so it seemed appropriate that I was determined to be miserable. In the morning Ming had some obsession we had to work through related to art school and her blog, which at that time featured writings about the Middle East where we’d travelled four years earlier. She had an idea she was being discriminated against on account of things she’d written about religion but these fears went away even before she went to Melbourne with her parents and Omer. While she was away I kept painting and finished the zodiac series then started on more figurative works without collage. 

At the end of this jag I went back to collage. This time I picked up where I’d started with Jeffrey Dahmer as the theme. I’d even taken one version of this work to the framers but then cancelled it and brought those early efforts home in the envelope I’d used to take them out to Richmond. The second time I used the figurative watercolour painting I’d developed while Ming and Omer were away but added collage and Posca marks on top of it. With the Japanese “kotowaza” paintings I’d been able to fit whole phrases onto a sheet of A5 paper, and with the new collage works I did the same but only with names. I did “Dahmer mostro” and “Barry Manilow” fitting the item (1 panel) with 12 letters, the first six done in collage and the second six done over the top in Posca (see below).

“Mostro” means “monster” in Italian and Barry Manilow was a torch-song crooner from the seventies I used to love.

On 11 Mar a friend of a friend asked me if I’d swap one of these works for a work of her own and we organised to meet the next day at her house, a terrace in Woolloomooloo. I promised to bring some things along in my rucksack and she took four of them plus a paramontage that was in the portfolio I also had with me. Below are the works of hers I chose, and which I later took to the framer. I planned to send the painting to Japan and keep the drawings here in Sydney.

On the same day that Simon and I met with Rozee we also went to Milsons Point by taxi. We caught the cab in the CBD, a short walk from Woolloomooloo. We met with Billy Lake who Simon had chosen to be in a group show with the two us and another friend. A young woman who makes large colourful canvases with a cartoonish bent that chimes in with the popular culture themes of our own work.

During the following week Ming and Omer left to go back to their place and I was busy so didn’t have time to go to poetry readings, though on Thursday night I went to Marrickville to have dinner with a friend and some of his pals. I was still making art but now with an exhibition planned it was somehow different, I was more selective, and thought in terms of themes and subjects. 

In fact I felt less free, more constrained by other people’s opinions. I wasn’t sure I liked this new feeling or if I disliked it. It felt good to be in train to becoming a collected artist, but on the other hand perhaps I hadn’t gotten used to the push and pull, the interaction that you have with an audience. 

On the morning of 24 Mar I began to think of my father again just after reading a Facebook friend’s post about ‘The Merchant of Venice’ – by this time I hadn’t read a Shakespeare play in over a decade but this teacher was doing a survey of Shakespeare’s works, one at a time, before posting his thoughts – and mine sat pungent and strong as a drill. I imagined posting something on Facebook but decided to write here in this diary instead. I’d gone to bed the night before without watching ‘Kavanaugh QC’ for some reason with the cold weather I was less inclined to stay up late though I got up in the morning at the usual time, and as the currawongs sang in the distance (or was it quite close). I wondered if it would rain. 

In fact I’d put on washing. I’d considered the night before starting a new series of paintings but had been celebrating my aloneness so declined evening’s invitation and instead watched TV, it was a rather sombre ending to an episode of ‘Father Brown’ then I tuned into Ten Bold to catch an ep of ‘NCIS’, I’m sure mum would’ve loved it, Gibbs listening to a blind photographer talk about the sweet smell of a diabetic’s breath, how do they make these things up where do the ideas come from do they have a catalogue of quaint facts as reference for their scriptwriters yes nowadays there are spin-offs all over the place ‘NCIS New Orleans’, ‘NCIS Los Angeles’, ‘NCIS Hawaii’ the beat rolls on and it’s me thinking of what to paint thinking of my father and how I got away without his blessing but on his coattails, thinking of how I make my paintings on the dining table next to the kitchen.

Mum was always in the kitchen and I was always putting things away in the cupboards sometimes cooking mum’d suddenly say “Where’s the salad dressing” (no she wouldn’t she’d say just “dressing”) and I’d get it out of the cupboard where I’d just placed it tidily, always putting things in their right place, correcting editing life, this is what a child does he or she edits his parent’s lives I’m still my mother’s son still my father’s son, my parents are still alive in my mind and they’ll be alive forever in this diary, together forever Peter and Judy 1955 married in Brighton I was born in Brighton Hospital on my birth certificate it has such information like ‘Kavanaugh QC’ the dry chats in chambers the applications to a club John Thaw also in ‘Inspector Morse’ then came ‘Lewis’ then ‘Endeavour’ series of TV shows going from the nineties to the twenties with Oxford at the centre, mum and dad went to Oxford on a Smithsonian jaunt it was the year I started the BA, it was 1981 I still have the group shot all those rich Americans in their suits looking collegial, mum made a drawing it’s on my wall as well I was at Paul’s that year hated it couldn’t wait to get out ended up near Badde Manors behind Grace Bros learned how to ride a motorcycle on land they later built public housing on, it used to be a great big paved lot my Ducati came afterward I started on a Suzuki with a black tank on my ‘Ls’ yes tootling around the lot learning how to ride my bike I thought a Ducati was cooler that’s why I bought it a friend of a friend Cyren Johnson had a Ducati he tried to ride mine once dropped it I didn’t get angry why would you get angry with someone for damaging a stupid bike though I regretted the mark on the tank the black tank with the gold stripe.

My heart is a black tank it contains a universe of suffering endless I told Omer my mind works like this if you added up the distance that every plant that had ever lived on the earth billions of years every continent every island every plant nodding. The distance of all of the leaves moving through space nodding I saw a post Facebook suggested I report about the invasion am I right it was me wondering if it would ever be possible to trust any church given the Russian church failed to communicate the truth about the invasion in fact took no steps to stop the carnage people dying for what? how could it be possible to trust authority of any kind given the failure of the ecumenical project to effect change ‘Kavanaugh QC’ and dying people in the distance ha! here only the sound of a commercial jet taking off over there the jets are throwing fire into the earth bombs spitting fire walls thrown down tumbling tumbling down acres of desperate ruin.

All the lives like mine. I asked for quotes from two framers because for the upstanding houses on Sydney you need frames if you want to sell art or so I thought little did I imagine how dear it could be. Frames so you can hang paper works on walls. Making frames a specialised task they have a selection of mouldings on the wall using Velcro carpet on the wall to hold the mouldings, customer chooses which one picks it off the wall there is a rack of mount-board samples as well match the mount-board with the moulding to make a set the sales clerk takes down the IDs of the items all very civilised the process not always seamless I imagine people often complain about the cost we worry about budgets the price of electricity up insurance up gas up petrol up everything up except incomes. 

Right to be cautious. Once home and before the time to watch the news I went through paintings I threw half-a-dozen items into recycling they’re paper after all maybe they’ll come back as kitchen towels or removalist boxes but the paintings I reserved for showing I did set aside in a pile every day changing my idea about what should be framed my friend Basia said in a message, “exhibiting art is a completely different game than making it” like chess like international diplomacy a game with endless numbers of variables nodding like the leaves of a plant in my garden spathiphyllum coleus colocasia endless centimetres moving through space over time time the variable space the variable I repot bits of the spathiphyllum using plastic pots soil from IGA carted with mum and dad’s trolley down Bay Street past the houses variable frontages some wood some brick the cars parked next to the pavement like chess pieces red blue grey black white coming back from the IGA or was it going to the IGA I can’t remember anyway I saw a lime green Yaris it was new driven by an old man.

On 25 Mar I did more painting, completing and starting I don’t exactly remember but the hours spent this way are a blessing at my time of life, what have I got to complain about. It was the election and I watched most of the broadcast but switched to ‘MacGyver’ when I got sick of the repetition, the show about a hacker who’d made a nuclear power plant overheat of course someone had to die in this case a factory technician with – wait for it – a family. My daughter told me that she’d been to see her brother and he’d drunk alcohol so couldn’t drive her and Ryo to the station and the flat is far from the station so she wanted to get a cab but it wouldn’t come so she caught a bus instead. We seem to care about our children in a way that makes them different from other people even though they are just “other people” with their enthusiasms and biases anyway her mother gave me some Japanese “kotowaza” so I could make paintings, black-and-white this time, and I also made two “double overlay” paintings this time on a Christmas theme.

I was funny with the “kotowaza” paintings because Basia without seeing the first in the set (I always make them in sets of two) had suggested grey and blue when I asked her what colours I should use, and I’d made a black-and-white painting. She put up in Messenger a photo she’d taken of a rabbit seen when she was walking in the street it was yellow and blue, and so I decided to use blue Posca for the second painting for which I got a saying. At the end of the month I went back to doing pure collages (see below) Some on cars and some on food.

End of year memorial: February

After in the afternoon getting a haircut on Botany Road I went out with Esag at about 5pm it was 2 Feb with Simon I was heading in the bus and on the train to Rushcutters Bay where we met with Sophie and Anthony, it was a lovely night Sophie got talking with Gavin and Daniel two men who worked up the road and Daniel ended up buying ‘Apparel VI’ (see below) I took the watercolours out of my knapsack to show Sophie and he immediately felt drawn to them he pounced flourishing a $50 note so I used his Biro to sign the thing on the back with the year is was made laying it flat for convenience on a dining table on the pavement, on the way up the hill toward Victoria Street we’d been talking about making art and Daniel expressed ideas about what paper to use he suggested going to A4 but with cheaper stock to alleviate fears about expense I’d explained how the 200gsm Reeves paper buckles when it dries Amanda says cockles I use so much water I explained to Daniel how I’d resolved to use more expensive options and had done so I did in fact yes I use beautiful cotton rag paper now it works fine lays flat when dry all in all it was a transformative night I got home in Anthony’s car talking about the paper stock on the way turning into Botany Road in his electric blue Lexus, at home I told Omer and Ming we were talking for a while in the night I was a bit high and feeling quite then as they retired I watched ‘Kavanagh QC’ and went to bed around midnight having not turned into a pumpkin.

‘Apparel VI’ in the making was actually a bit of a struggle because I had to look through quite a number of issues of ‘New Scientist’ to find the requisite text to use in the collage for my purposes I wanted to match the words with a clothing ad I’d found Adolfo Dominguez uses the words “40 years old” a Google search I hadn’t actually gone looking for their ad especially nothing about it drew it to me particularly I was just looking for a clothing ad I’d finally there in the magazine found text saying “340,000 years old” and so I cut off the bits I didn’t need clip scissors snip snip clean careful don’t cut what you need clip I was looking at all the pages vigilant hypervigilant trying to find what I needed in the clutter of words images TV on in the background voices comforting English yes my language would it be the same if they were talking French in the magazines scanning each page trying to identify something to use passing quickly over what I didn’t need and keeping the nugget I did the rough diamond. 

The title of the magazine remarkable in the case ‘New Scientist’ it is yes that’s right it wasn’t done with Daniel in mind that would be strange impossible to predict we were just out with the art group met by chance just randoms though he had a pen in his pocket but his office near the gallery we stopped outside Sophie but the magazine name apposite because Daniel and Gavin work at a medical research institute I’ll never forget that night it will stay in my memory forever – at least as long as I’m alive, but then afterward it’ll remain alive in this chronicle – he wanted an orange one and so I offered this one and he took it it was magical I don’t know why he wanted an orange one why “orange” yes but later I resolved to make more orange ones oh my God can you believe it I made my first sale in fact Omer a couple of days before had singled out ‘Apparel VI’ due to its immediate impact he liked it because it spoke to him I don’t know why he couldn’t explain though he tried, it just clicked he pointed to it as it lay with the other three (I make them in sets of four) on the coffee table his mind working like this very literal he thought the man in the picture was 40 years old so – click – it spoke to him not like Kavanagh QC who must be 65 if he’s a day John Thaw must be dead these long years oh God it’s a bit spooky watching stupid crime dramas with dead actors Thaw cold death actors in them death when was it made in the early noughts probably yes definitely dead leaf blower whipper snipper pollution oh I’m stuck with stupid crime dramas look at me just like my old mum Judy and ‘Hawaii Five-0’ when dad was away on business such a relief when he wasn’t there people could do what they wanted for a change I make my art on the dining table mum had a studio next to the kitchen remodelled at Vaucluse she never made art there she was always doing something in the kitchen though I remember calling dad on the phone from the kitchen at Vaucluse the old one facing the bay and I was asking him if I could drop French ha! listen to me go on I told Daniel the same story on the evening of 2 Feb what a day it was, we also started talking about a pool hall in the CBD in the 70s he said it was in Pitt Street me insistent it was on George Street, listen back then in the kitchen I was only 16 but God look I am 60 (61 at time of editing this entry) and just like snap snip just that all the years have gone by all the pain and suffering needless a complete waste of time making someone else rich in actual fact but oh I made my first sale.

Snap. On 3 Feb I started making another series of watercolours with – snip – more collage this time National Rugby League team logos starting with the Roosters then the Rabbitohs I did six in total Sharks Raiders green red yellow black I had to redo the one for the Sharks because of an error in drawing the first time and when I went to bed I was in the process of thinking of how to do the Broncos and the Cowboys would I have the right colours I thought about how to make the colours for the Broncos the colours team colours so important for people yes black and white ‘Kavanagh QC’ or sports logos printed on shirts silk screen silk out to sea Kavanagh QC the team sponsors also printed silk screen pressed with ink onto the shirts men wear to go to the markets on a Sunday they wear these sponsored shirts to take the kids to piano practice to sport games on Saturday school competition you can buy shirts like this in shops oh God that leaf blower or is it a whipper snipper endless noise polluting the – the what? – atmosphere I asked Bronwen if she wanted to go to a gallery on Sunday she said she’s going to the Galapagos on Tuesday she’d let me know closer to Sunday and asked me if it would be ok I said sure the trip on her bucket list the trip by plane she’s off with her mum I was “Wow” what an adventure not like driving to Camperdown I sold a painting definitely on my bucket list ha God NRL teams what next I’d done six the parcels I’d posted had all arrived in Japan I’d posted them in the weeks leading up to this moment oh the Galapagos all that wildlife Bronwen had in time come to the vision board class with Sophie taking the class we all made art together it was fun transformative we did watercolours too another time another time the next time was transformative watercolour then collage free I’d driven all over the city picking up magazines Facebook Marketplace giving away for free people just want to get them out of their house one’s man’s trash is another man’s treasure ‘Kavanagh QC’ boxes full of ‘New Scientist’ from Riverwood then was it Balgowlah somewhere up that way a little house on a back street computer magazines just like that in the car navy blue Ensign snap just over speed bumps.

I continued for the next couple of weeks making more series and by 16 Feb when I went to a Peterhsam Bowlo poets reading night I took along some of my creations which went down well with people there who’d gathered to listen to poetry. Everyone who saw them enjoyed the ‘CAPitalism’ series (‘Cars, ads, pop music’) and the ‘Shipwreck’ series and I read out a sonnet from 2010 about a suicide on account of the evening’s theme of death, one of their number had passed away unexpectedly in hospital, here are some of the paintings we looked at on the night.

The above work is of a Toyota Corolla’s taillight like another person who saw this painting the woman I showed it to in Petersham liked the “colours” it’s funny how people use this word for this one in the series and not for other ones even though they all use colours weird that people are predictable are they not all unique all the same one and all for one.

Musketeers. The same woman remembered like me the Pasha Bulker grounding shown in the above painting, it took place in 2007 a lifetime away but still in memory. When I got home because it was Thursday I watched ‘Kavanaugh QC’ this time about a man with PTSD the show was made in the nineties and such topics weren’t normally talked about it’s interesting how TV shows can break new ground nowadays a show about a returned soldier who turns violent would be considered routine, not because returned soldiers routinely murder people but because we now are more aware of such disability and are willing to publicly acknowledge it shame gone away maybe a little but still present for many.

Another one of the ‘CAPitalism’ series I discussed was with Christopher Michaels who commented on the one with the Ford Mustang, he said that now that Ford no longer makes cars in Australia you see a lot more of this type of car on the streets and I had to agree, my next-door neighbour has one it’s a beast with a loud exhaust I remember my Ducati in my twenties a loud exhaust we change and we grow old it’s the way of the world we die, maybe I should get another Ducati now that I’m retired an old codger riding round on a muscle bike how would that look why would I care I’m just daydreaming anyway.

I was out at Windsor for a curator’s talk on 15 Feb and dropped in at the framer’s studio to pick things up and to specify more items, I got a whole lot of things, ten in all, and put them in the back of the car to bring back home. The next day before the poetry reading I rehung the living room wall (see below) bringing down from the hallway on the first floor a number of items including photos Aunt Madge made when she was alive, I’d had them printed from slides and framed.

Because her photos are all of cars (these ones and I got some of her boat photos framed) nearby I put up two acrylic paintings by Christ O’Doherty. The Christine Dean painting in bright colours was purchased from the artist in a swap on 14 Feb her husband wanted one of Madge’s husband Elmer’s Danish oil paintings and so I said he could have it if she gave me a painting. When they called from her mother’s house where the works are stored they asked me also to pay Christine some money and I baulked as I’d thought it was a straight-out one-for-one swap so they offered two instead of one I immediately jumped in the car and drove to Mascot to use the ATM to withdraw banknotes then met the two of them at my place and we talked in the front room for an hour or so it was enjoyable to discuss art surrounded by art. Christine signed one of the works that had nothing written on the back and we discussed Adam Cullen, whose ‘Murray Carp’ is on the wall in the entranceway, and Anita Cobbey who was murdered in the 70s poor girl or was it the 80s I forget the details but remember it was grisly Westies.

Also in the living room hang is a print by Melbourne artist Hego (near the TV) showing a model named Olive. I’d bought this print in Newtown at a pop-up shop on 3 Nov 2022 when I went there specifically to see this Melbourne artist’s works, somehow I’d been exposed to works by Hego on social media (this is how I got to know Victorian artist Mark Dober as well) and had taken a liking to them, so went out on the train from Redfern, the pop-up shop was south of the station in the “Paris” end of Newtown, my heartland I lived down that way in the 80s before I bought the Ducati I can’t remember the exact sequence of events life’s like a dream one day we’re living in Newtown then next moment we’re in Glebe what happens to all the time it vanishes like a thought snap it goes away and we’re left with – what? – a sensation like loss, drowning in our own ideas, wallowing in grief at the thought of all the time that has passed the pain is enormous but pain is close to pleasure life’s wonderful God.

I also had the blinds person come out her name is Dana she arrived on Tues as well, initially her GPS sent her to the wrong address but she called me from the street outside number 3 and I told her which house to look for so she drove up in her car. She’d been in touch the week before when her car was at the service centre but hadn’t been able to make it then as the mechanics hadn’t finished their work, now she went to the back bedroom on the first floor where the bathroom door had exploded and she measured the space and gave me a quote. I went upstairs when I was free and made the payment from the pink slip she left with me, two days later I messaged Dana asking if the money’d been received then the office emailed me saying full payment had come through.

They’re up in Lane Cove, I was up in Pymble on 30 Oct the year before picking up an oil painting ($85) seen on Facebook Marketplace I got Amanda to ask the restorer Chris (not to be confused with the paper restorer Rose) he cleaned it and fixed the frame which was coming apart then when I got it on Wed I hung it in the entranceway beside the front door. Where I met the woman to get the painting was right next to two main roads busy as buggery road leading east and west north and south a crossroads like where I am right now shall I go downstairs shall I brush my teeth shall I continue writing what to do what to say have I said enough Kavanaugh QC his wife of many years they obviously love each other love not shown like this in TV dramas like this anymore or is it who knows there are so many crime dramas like an altar at which we pray screened into our living rooms love in bed husband and wife too saccharine nowadays there needs to be more aggression frustration what is the word for the feeling we are so close but still two separate – animals – people two individuals yes that’s the word maybe someone should write an academic study of love in crime dramas over the decades that would be revealing maybe someone has already written one, I’ll go downstairs I can hear someone in the kitchen see what they’re doing it was nothing I watched TV news then came back up to write an email.

I went and bought plants from a man named John in Pagewood on 17 Feb he has bees buzzing around his back yard though they didn’t molest us, his plants reasonable starting at $5 each so I picked out four to take back home with me in the RAV4. He also sells honey from his property up at Newcastle so I bought some for Ming and Omer, his house on a busy road but I parked in a side street, I carried the box I’d brought and put it in the back seat then drove back to Botany, repotted some of the acquisitions and later in the evening innocently repotted some of the pups of the poisonous mother of thousands plant that I have growing in the entranceway. I got more potting mix when I went down the road to IGA in the afternoon to get milk and nuts etcetera, carrying the bag in one hand with the groceries in the other, I just made it home exhausted it was a struggle but all good in the end we all die it’s about making good memories in the minds of others I never knew this when I was young what did I believe in those days I can’t remember it was long ago, ages. In the evening I watched part of ‘Van der Valk’ but went to bed before it ended, another stupid crime drama people screaming at each other displaying hatred in their speech in real life they’re far more circumspect I think we get sick of moderating our discourse we crave the freedom to say what we really want to say in a manner of our own choosing so we can express the hatred and fear that fills us like jugs of wine mother of thousands poisonous to cats, dogs and humans I shouldn’t propagate it but it’s so cute.

I went rogue and bought more plants on 23 Feb from a woman living in Wahroonga, then on 24 Feb I went north again, this time to Warriewood, to get pots that also had been advertised on Facebook Marketplace. The big, grey pots cost more than the plants naturally but they were perfect (see photo below) and in the afternoon after getting home and eating I filled them with the potting mix I’d bought at the nursery on the way back to Botany (there was just room enough in the car for the bags of soil and I bought five 25kg bags) planting the camellia and hydrangeas in the pots that’d originally come from Target, mine being 25% cheaper than when the vendor had bought them I learned from the sticker on the side of the box bonus yay me. After doing all of this and finding myself with no more potting mix to use with anything else that I might acquire in future I wisely went to IGA bought more, using mum and dad’s two-wheeled trolley to bring the three, 25-litre bags home along Bay Street. I repotted some of the spathiphyllum by tearing the plants apart with my hands and using some other pots I had that I filled with soil.

On 25 Feb I was back on the road again to Sylvania (yes, to the south this third time on the road chasing bargains and green things) which was a bit closer to home but also a place like the other two that normally I would never visit. I noted one evening how it was a year exactly since I first started doing the garden, originally it’d been on the occasion of Putin’s invasion of Ukraine that I began to put the plants out, buy plants, and choose locations for plants to live because reading had become impossible in the face of the Russian president’s aggression and I wanted something else to do. Many of the plants I bought via Facebook Marketplace or from the nursery had survived and I’d gotten used to doing something new every week or so (mainly by trial and error) so the little plants from Sylvania were repotted some of them when I got home before eating food, then I went to the bank to replenish my store of dollar notes.

I still had one unused pot of the same, large size and on 26 Feb asked some vendors on Facebook Marketplace about frangipani they were selling. There was one vendor out at Cabramatta but I didn’t want to travel so far. I asked another vendor, closer this time, but she initially said other buyers were coming to pick up her free offerings. In the end I did get a frangipani, in fact it was a vendor in Monterey so not very far from home. 

The day before I’d split out the spathiphyllum, breaking two of the plants into several bits and repotting them. On the 26th I also put more soil in with the colocasias in the light well because the dirt level in the central pot had sunk down.

I drove to Parramatta on 27 Feb in the evening so it was a big adventure for me. I fact I organised to meet with a Facebook Marketplace buyer who lives in the north-west of the city, and he called me when I was in Camperdown picking up a friend to take to a poetry reading. The accelerated heartrate I experienced on the way to Camperdown didn’t continue on the M4 out west thankfully and I arrived at the meeting point on Hunter Street without delay, the poetry reading was fun and I did read out two poems, then I dropped off the people who were with me and drove back home.

More Japanese sayings done in watercolour and planned a series for the zodiac but in Japanese because my daughter is big on astrology.